Short circuit evaluation, is it bad practice?@linac now putting something on the right-hand-side of & or | to make sure a side-effect happens is something I'd say certainly is bad practice: It won't cost you anything to put that method call on its own line.

Where should my team start with becoming “modern”?The reason normalization is called normalization and not normalizing or something else, is that at the time it was a topical joke to stick -ization on the end of things to make fun of the name of Richard Nixon's Vietnamization policy to increase training and equipping of South Viet Nam's troops while reducing the number of US troops in Viet Nam. This shows how "modern" normalization is.

Big O Question about an algorithm with (n^2 + n) / 2 growth rate@BenVoigt I've yet to come across one with the same rhetorical impact as this had when I first read it; it's not originally mine, I stole it from Eric Lippert, who may have originated it or may have taken it from someone else. Of course it references jokes such as "π equals 3 for small values of π and large values of 3" which is older still.

Best way to define, start and stop threads in C#I'm guessing it's a sort of pre hoc ergo propter hoc thing; a system has performance problems and because of that it runs at high CPU utilisation while not getting stuff done, then improvements mean that it runs at low CPU utilisation while delivering more actual work per second, (just as a massive increase to your analogous factory's efficiency could result in both more output and more idle time) and the resultant low CPU utilisation is seen as a symptom of the performance rather than a symptom of the efficiency.